Live Life. Leave a Legacy.

Being a Dale Carnegie Trainer

A few days ago, I received a message in my LinkedIn inbox from another user of the professional networking site. When I took the time to write down my answer, I found it to be very profound and thought provoking to me as a Dale Carnegie trainer. Here is the question and the answer. Parts marked by [ ] are comments I added for the benefit of the readers of this post. I express many thanks to Ms. Preeyaa Gandhi for her enlightening question.

Dear Mr. Siregar,

I am one of the big admirers of Dale Carnegie and Dale Carnegie Training. I came across your profile while browsing DC Global Graduates. Wow! you got a quite impressive profile- vast and in depth experience from DC Training. I know you would be extremely busy but I would greatly appreciate your insight into DC Trainer experience.

Looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks,
Priya

(There are interim responses between us, but for the sake of brevity, I chose to omit them from this post.)

Dear Ms. Gandhi,

A long time ago, way before I became a trainer, I heard one Dale Carnegie trainer marveled at how advanced Mr. Carnegie thinking was in his life time. I didn’t take much notice of that by then. Now that I have been a trainer, I cannot help but to realize how true the statement is, even for today.

If you have read Mr. Carnegie’s biography (part of it can be read in a booklet called “The Little Known Secret of Success”), you would know that one challenge that Mr. Carnegie faced when he first started [a public speaking class with YMCA in 1912, the predecessor of] what is now known as Dale Carnegie Course was , how to come up with immediate results for his class members.

[The deal with YMCA was that he could only earn part of the weekly proceed of the course. If he wanted to keep earning money, he must make sure that his students returned the next week. If they felt they didn’t get anything from the course, they certainly wouldn’t be back.] It was one question that led Mr. Carnegie to the discovery of the teaching techniques that we use today.

Even today, as the world becomes more and more advanced in technology, [and quick results are becoming the norm rather than an exception] the same rule applies. Dale Carnegie trainers must come up with immediate results for our customers, or else. This forces us to think deeply about our customers, about THEIR challenges, about THEIR needs, so we can make our programs relevant to THEM, and so we can come up with immediate results for THEM.

And working in Dale Carnegie means that the same rule applies to my job as well. How can I bring immediate results to my team? How can I make everything as practical as possible so that everyone can immediately benefit from my ideas? How can I help my team to immediately generates higher performance?

In essence, what I learned from my job in Dale Carnegie Training is:
– To put others first
– To come up with ways to help others get results, immediately.